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Blog 4: Life Is Complicated:

Darwinian evolutionary theory was built on the fundamental assumption that life, at it’s most basic cellular level is ‘simple’. Fact… That fundamental assumption is emphatically wrong! If something is alive – it’s complicated! If the knowledge that unimaginably complex biological machinery and information technology lay at the heart of every living cell, I for one believe Darwin himself would never have entertained the ideas in his head for a second. This truth alone ought to be enough to bury naturalistic macro-evolutionary theory but added to this the fact that many of the structures and machines which make up (and are essential to) the cells function/survival are ‘irreducibly complex’. This simply means many components must work together, all at the same time in order to have function/survival value. Serious understanding of these things must surely put naturalistic ideas way beyond the boundaries of credibility. It gets even more incredulous when we discover that there is layered overlapping coding built within the reading mechanism, by which I mean a particular strand of DNA used for building a particular protein may be read in part by an enzyme copying the information (using a different end-point) to build a different protein component. As if that wasn’t enough; we have now discovered that the coding is governed by another code system called the epigenetic code which basically acts as a switch mechanism which determines when particular traits could be expressed. These switches are designed to be activated by environmental or dietary factors and are already built into the coding system waiting to be expressed should suitable conditions arise. If Charles Darwin understood that these complex mechanisms were already built into the genetic coding when studying the varied traits in finches I’m sure he would not have concluded ‘time chance and survival’ were designer. In fact, Darwin knew nothing of modern genetics and believed in some the called ‘pan-genesis’ the acquirement of desired characteristics brought about by use and disuse (a totally discredited view). Modern evolutionary believers are known as ’Neo-Darwinists’. Random, mindless mutations (copying errors) in the DNA coding coupled with survivability is now the mechanism looked towards as the vehicle to create new species. The problems here ought to be blatantly obvious: Mutations are known for the harm they do to existing function. Eternity wouldn’t be enough time for random, mindless mutations to come up with the goods – during which time the billions of harmful mutations would wipe out the species millions of times over. Hundreds and thousands of mutations would need to occur simultaneously in order to produce structures with many protein components to function and aid (not hinder) survival – which could only be described in terms of ‘the miraculous’. I think the most obvious difficulty lies with the fact that mutations can only operate on existing genes – the question where the genes came from is not even addressed, you can only mutate a gene which already exists etc… Despite the desperate attempts and mental gymnastics to get around some of these issues the more we learn about life at its molecular level the more bewilderingly complicated it appears. To put this another way: Life is not the result of chemical elements simply reacting with each other – not even if you had all the ingredients in the right proportions. If you took a dead animal and ran it through a blending machine it wouldn’t matter how many years you watched the contents of the blender you would never see the chemical components arrange themselves into a living system and climb out of the blender, much less become conscious, moral, rational creatures like us.

One of the principle truths in biology is ‘life begets life’ living things come from that which is not alive. That is what we observe, so why is it that we are repeatedly told that all life came from non-life. If the scientific method is based on repeated observation etc…. it should be a given that no scientist should believe otherwise. A well-known scientist once said ‘Death is the triumph of chemistry over biology’. The Bible simply says that creatures were made to reproduce after their kind… If with all our combined intelligence, it is beyond our intelligence to create a living, self-reproducing system (even with all the constitutional chemicals at hand) it is becoming quite ridicules to believe it took no intelligence in the first place. It seems to me to be a rather ’unintelligent’ stand to take, given the fact that if scientists ever actually one day do manage to create a viable living system it would only emphasise the truth that it took ‘an awful lot’ of intelligence to achieve it! To evoke ‘time’ as the miracle worker in the process is an absolute non-starter since time is the vehicle which allows natural chemical processes to do their work and run from order to chaos. Time is not the saviour but the enemy of evolution since the natural chemical processes are running in the opposite direction – time has more chance to do more damage not create more complexity. You may have heard an analogy often used which says that if you see a train set off from Manchester you may assume it will arrive in London even if you haven’t witnessed every event along the journey. This would be a good illustration and not an unreasonable assumption – the trouble is the train is heading in the wrong direction! If you stood on the platform in Manchester and watched the train set off to the North no thinking person would conclude it would arrive in London. In that sense, I believe natural processes of time and chemistry have ‘Edinburgh’ written all over them. The Mutational burden is running in the wrong direction and the gene pool is becoming more corrupt, which simply means more and more genetic birth defects etc. The only reason the human race is not extinct many times over is by virtue of the fact that we haven’t been around for anything like the length of time we are indoctrinated with. There simply is no credulous mechanism which can produce the new information required, on the scale needed to write the software for any living thing, let alone all living things. As mentioned in the previous blog all positions regarding origins are positions of ‘faith’ but there are different kinds of faith. There is such a thing as ‘Reasonable Faith’. This is when trust is placed on something being true when there are reasonable grounds for the assumptions. There is such a thing as ‘Blind Faith’. This is when somebody takes a leap in the dark and believes something is true without any reason whatsoever for the assumption. There is such a thing as ‘Irrational Faith’. This is when somebody believes something to be true despite known laws, logic and observation pointing in the opposite direction. I am firmly convinced that people who believe in atheistic naturalism are of this category. Wilfully suppressing what is an obvious inference to design and being absolutely bent on trying to cram into a box called ‘evolution’ – things which clearly DO NOT FIT! – and run CONTRARY to known natural law.